i think i have to disagree with you anasasis...
i think that would be a really expensive way of doing things in a game, although, i dont actually know the ability of the consoles these days....and what they can handle, so you could be right
maybe it was made from lots of little polys and then something like the transfer-maps or ultimapper (dunno the max equivalent is) was used to get the transparency maps.

i also think doing it that way is rather time consuming unless they had a script to do it for them

I would attempt what you're going for using this idea http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html
it's a hair tutorial but it seems to me like you might be able to get the effect you're looking for using this idea.

make a patchy trans map, squars of white squares and black, put it on a layer node then ontop of it in the layer node attatch a ramp with, set the blending method to multiply on the layer node.

Make a sampler info node and attatch the facing ratio attribute to the v coord of the ramp. Edit the ramp so that it is transparent at the edges and solid in the centre. This should give the correct effect if im not mistaken, you want no interpolation between the gradient values.

really sorry but..
with the transparency map what to i set the colour to? (i cant help but think im doing something wrong.....)
i know thats not really clear but i cant think of a better way to say i have no idea what im doing....(i really need that rendering book (only 3 days to go!))
sorry

i really feel i should know more when ive been at this for so long.......

Yeah, not bad and I do agree with you about the ear being too tall. In the top picture, the top edge of the ear and the bottom edge are not too far off from being parallel. Also, the body looks a little long compared to the reference image. Hard to tell though because of the angle of the reference image.

Looks like your project is going to turn out quite well.

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